The story of Warboard

Warboard is a cloud based platform which manages issues in a federated model helping collaboration and communication across a project team.

Its story goes back four years and is far from a new or untested platform.

In 2013 the BIM. Technologies team were working on some high profile projects with early adopter clients. These clients were taking a huge leap of faith and had little objective information to review progress or value of their BIM investment.

Initially we were keen to develop a dashboard which would track issues and attributes in a model. The graphs would show the movement of data and therefore progress towards the perfectly coordinated model.

We were able to print a report and give real time access to this information to clients via an iPad.

Much of this information already lives in Navisworks but is inaccessible and invisible to commissioning clients.

The dashboard made the design process visible and encouraged the team to focus on coordination.

The platform was popular with clients and as an internal tool helped the BIM technologies team to communicate with the team and gave them a unique platform.

As Warboard was used on more live projects a number of potential additional features were identified. These included assigning of tasks and BCF import for example.

These improvements were developed in house by the Space Applied Technologies team in response to requests from the BIM. Technologies team who were getting positive feedback from design teams who found the platform useful for communication and management.

As the number of projects increased to over 100 the number of users also increased.

During this time many of the users which included architects, engineers and contractors asked if they could have their own access to the tool.

At this stage, as an internal product, it had not been developed commercially.

We realised that there was a demand for the platform and at the beginning of 2017 we made the decision to rebuild Warboard as a commercial platform from the ground up.

It is this version which has now been launched and includes all of the original features as well as a number of new ones

This is only the start of the development of Warboard and see it as a central project tool for the monitoring and management of design information.